New Diablo 3 patch goes live, brings with it gold duping bug

Whoops! In the eighteen hours since Diablo 3 patch 1.0.8 went live, an unknown number of players found and exploited a bug that let them duplicate stacks of sweet, sweet gold. In a game with a real-money auction house, a bug like this might have proved lucrative for a few and economy-destroying for the rest of us.

According to a post by a community manager on Battle.net, Blizzard immediately brought the in-game auction houses offline to stop the exploitation and try to quash the bug late last night. After about an hour of downtime, servers were brought back up.

Though many players in the ensuing thread called for rollbacks, Blizzard ultimately decided not to undo the progress made by the entire population since the patch was implemented. Instead, they'll be looking at the exploiting accounts individually and assessing punishments that may include “temporary locks, suspensions, and/or bans.”

Aside from a twitchy bug in the auction houses, patch 1.0.8 brings an array of balances and tweaks affecting cooldown times, achievements not being awarded, matchmaking and stack size for gold in the auction house.